This Dam Makes Enough FREE Energy To Run A City

I love how genuinely excited Robert is.

Great video, but I have to rant about units: at 1:56 you say "one cubic meter of water dropping 1 meter downwards produces 1 kilowatt of electricity". No! it is 9.8m/s^2 * 1000 kg * 1m = 9800 kilojoules or 0.0027 kWh. Kilowatts are a measure of power. If you mean energy its kilojoules or kWh. Energy = power * time.

It's one thing to bring renewable energy stories to the masses, but it is quite another to make them both interesting and inspiring. I genuinely appreciate the obvious care that goes into editing and producing this content. Clean energy production is one of the great challenges of our time, and it's clear through your phenomenal attention to compelling and informative story telling that you recognize the gravity of the role you play in bringing these stories to your dedicated viewership. Another episode to be proud of, well done!

FYI ... Hydroelectric generation in Scotland started early in the 20th century and is one form of renewable energy. It was kick-started by the need for power to drive aluminium smelting plants in the Highlands. This led to the construction of the Laggan dam and hydroelectric system in 1934. Currently in Scotland, around 5000GWh of electricity from hydropower are produced every year; that’s enough to power roughly half of Scotland’s homes. This success is set to continue now that the Scottish Government has identified sustainable hydropower as a key part of Scotland’s lower carbon future. Source SEPA

The quality of production of this video, combined with Robert's peerless presentation, and a fascinating subject: lovely work :)

A shout out to whoever does the music/editing in the Fully Charged videos. Always a great benefit to showcasing the content.

Little did I know when I casually clicked on a video with the bloke who was Kryten enthusiastically jabbering about electric cars, that years down the line I would be religiously watching that channel. And even though there are new (bloody excellent) presenters who have joined down the line, there's still a joy in seeing Robert giving an enthusiastic puppy a run for its money for sheer energy levels. That's before I even compare the production values (Go silent team in the background!)

As a Canadian I want to thank you for showing off some very important infrastructure in a very honest ans sincere way talking about how it has, is and will impact our environment and First Nations. Great Job Robert (and team)!

Just before Robert said massive. I auto-completed to mahooosive in my head. 😁😁😁

You know an industrial facility is big when you see adult tricycles with baskets parked all over. Those are for the maintenance staffers- they need to be able to carry their tools from one job to another and tricycles are often the best way possible to do that.

A very interesting video, especially as a resident of BC! Fun fact: a friend of mine owns The Modern Bakeshop and Cafe! I have vague memories of recommending it to the FC team a while back when I heard they were coming here. I took the Revelstoke Dam tour a few years ago: it's a damn big dam! I also drove up to Mica Dam 'cause I'm weird like that.

We should be doing more of this in England. All I hear from people who are against renewables is, "but what about 'battries'? It's just as bad to make them" I say that we don't need batteries, we need 'storage' .. How about doing more to improve the renewables in this county, sitting down with the department heads who can actually move things forward so we are more self reliant. Great shows, really well put together and fantastically informational, I just always think that it's the government who need to be watching this show and shows like it and the presenters hitting our government hard over moving forward now so the UK is future proofed.

A fantastic episode, more of the like please, I get a thrill from large industrial spaces like that! Jessie does a great job of explaining the operation of the Hydro plant and the obvious level of cleanliness is testament to the care taken in maintaining the facility.

Robert, I would like to invite you to come and visit Quebec. Revelstoke is great and set in a wonderful setting however, If you want to see hydro electric power on a large scale, we have something to show you. Just one of our installations up north produces upwards of 42 TWh of clean electricity yearly. And we are supplying New-York. Let me know if you want to visit, I can arrange something.

When I was a child, a whole lot of decades ago, the family went to a hydro electric dam and took the tour. It wasn't as big as this one but it was very, very impressive. Like everything else in humanity it's not free and it's not 100% free from environmental issues but they are much less than a lot of methods of electricity production and mostly come from the building in the first place. This one is immense and beautiful. As others have said, it's grand seeing this and seeing Robert so enthused.

If you want to see a large scale hydro system that dates back decades, have a look at the Snowy Hydro system in Australia. Not as many gigawatts but a lot of tunnels. But also have a look at Tasmania, because the entire island is powered by wind and hydro except in drought.

So pleased you came to visit us here in Canada. We have many examples of hydro electric power ( Niagara falls and Quebec amongst them). Nice to see them mention the rebuilding of the damaged relationship between the indigenous community and the powers that be as today is truth and reconciliation day and the true horrors suffered by these amazing people is only just coming to light now after decades of cover ups and denials ☹️

Long time born here BC resident who still much appreciates the fact that we actually had political leadership back in the 50's and 60's that got stuff done and wasn't bogged down by endless lawyers and 'rights' issues. We have all enjoyed the benefits, including those with the rights. Not mentioned in this video was the fact that these dams were also built as part of flood control, not just for hydro. Portland Oregon on the same Columbia used to get severely impacted by huge river floods.

Great to see a video from my province! Personally I'm very proud of the fact that we're nearly exclusively powered by zero-emissions hydro power; it is not zero-impact, but it's certainly a lot better than burning fossil fuels. We're very well-positioned to aggressively reduce carbon emissions in the coming years by switching to EVs and heat pumps which will both benefit from being fed from clean electricity. Of note is that in spite of its gargantuan size, Revelstoke is actually only the third-largest dam by peak output (until they install the 6th turbine) and second-largest by annual energy output, with the WAC Bennett on the Peace River generating nearly twice the annual output of Revelstoke. They briefly touch on it in the video, but the majority of BC's hydroelectric generation is provided by multiple dams on a small number of rivers (Peace River and Columbia River). While this doesn't entirely eliminate the ecosystem disruptions of putting a hydroelectric dam on a river, it does reduce the overall impact since adding a second or third dam to a river that's already got one does not cause as much overall disruption as damming a whole new otherwise-pristine river. The additional dams are on a path that's already impacted for fish migration, and you also don't need to flood nearly as large an area as only one upstream dam requires a large reservoir for water storage and flood control and the downstream dams can either be entirely run-of-river or have only very small dams, resulting in less overall flooded area. It's important to be realistic and pragmatic about power generation and its impacts, and to recognize that all forms of generation have environmental impacts and the choice isn't between "have impacts" by building a power plant and "not have impacts" by not building it, but between the relative impacts of the available sources of power we choose to build and use. If a hydroelectric dam is displacing or replacing fossil fuel generation somewhere it is inarguably a win in my books, and it has some very valuable storage and dispatch characteristics that means it complements solar/wind very well. Our provincial neighbour to the east currently gets nearly all of their power from fossil fuels, and if BC can export an excess of hydroelectricity to other locations like that with less plentiful hydro resources then it means overall emissions go down substantially. Avoiding as much climate impact as possible is going to require aggressive electrification of things that currently use fossil fuels (transportation and heating, especially), which will require more electricity. I'd much rather it come from a hydro plant than a natural gas plant, supplemented with whatever wind and solar we can install in our rainy, mountainous province.

As someone who worked on the construction of this dam and powerhouse from, start to finish, I'd like to thank you for the way you have presented your video. It was very enjoyable to look back and see what was accomplished.